A cultural history of higher space, 1869-1909

Borges on Hinton

Jorge Luis Borges was a fan of Hinton’s higher space writing, so much so that he included the first collection of Scientific Romances in The Library of Babel (or ‘La Biblioteca di Babele’) produced with Italian art-book publisher Franco Maria Ricci in the 1970s (French interview with the publisher here). It’s a beautiful looking series of 33 titles, including Henry James, Arthur Machen, Poe, Wells etc. (full list here) and was republished in French by the recently defunct Panama editions in 2006.

Borges’s prologue is also included in Selected Non-Fiction, which is rather more accessible. It is eminently quotable, so I’d like to share a couple of choice nuggets here:

“Others seek and achieve notoriety; Hinton has achieved almost total obscurity. He is no less mysterious than his work.”

re: the introduction to A New Era of Thought: “This suggests a probable suicide or, more likely, that our fugitive friend had escaped to the fourth dimension which he had glimpsed, as he himself told us, thanks to a steadfast discipline.”

“Why not suppose Hinton’s book to be perhaps an artifice to evade an unfortunate fate? Why not suppose the same of all creators?”